Brewery Update #4 - Floor Design

Written by: Alex
Hits: 3745

Now that all the floorboards are up in the brewery it gives me a chance to gauge what work is required to in order to install a suitable floor. As my brewery is going to be rather small my requirements are modest, but it's a sensible idea to give a thought to future expansion whilst we are doing this. I plan to install a sloped floor leading to a central drain in the middle. This will help to significantly improve water run off and reduce dampness leading to mould and eventual nasty things that could infect the beer I'll be brewing. I also only want to do this work once and undertake it at a reasonable cost based on the requirements needed.

The building itself provides limitations on the maximum size of equipment that may be installed. At the current time the only way to bring in medium commercial size brewing vessels and above would be to remove a wall or ceiling. The doors certainly aren't wide enough! Expansion is a matter for the future but I'm thinking that it may be possible to install a 5-7 barrel plant with some tinkering at a later date. Going to the Internet we see that a typical stainless steel fermenter for a 7 barrel system weighs around 700-800kg and once you add the liquid ( 288 pints x (568ml) x 7 = 1145kg ) you can see we're over 2 tonnes. A similar calculation for a 5 barrel fermenter gives around 1300kg for container and liquid. There are of course alternative types of containers that weigh less but we can't do anything about the liquid. The boiling vessel will need to be larger and will hold around 10-15% more volume. So we have some very heavy objects to support but all this weight need not be distributed at a single point on our floor. Brewing vessels typically are supported by four legs which each take a quarter of the total weight, so around 500kg for each leg. Brewing vessels without legs distribute their weight over the entire area in contact with the floor. Strength is specified as the amount of force in KiloNewtons that the surface can withstand per metre squared (KN/m^2) and so by increasing the area over which the downwards force of any object is applied we can reduce the required floor strength requirements.

So my first job was to take my brewery plan and produce a map of the likely loads that would occur at different points across the floor. For a stack of grain containers this can be done by adding up the total weight of containers and contents and dividing by the area of the containers that will come in contact with the floor. The weight must be converted to force by multiplying by gravity or by 10 to give a little bit of overhead. The greatest downwards force will be produced by liquids that I'm storing in my cold room as I may have the results of many days of brewing either fermenting, conditioning or sat in casks or bottles ready to be stored. After performing the calculations for a row of fermentation vessels, a high stack of bottles, cask stack and the brewing equipment full of liquid I've arrived at a rather modest maximum load of 294kg/m^2 for my small brewery. I would however like to consider installing a 5 barrel brewery at a future date and therefore my floor design will require a strength of 3 tonnes per m^2 or 30KN/m^2 to account for future needs.

There are really only two choices of approach open to me. 1) Fill in the gap under the floor and pour a slab of concrete or 2) Create a new suspended floor replacing the wooden beams with steel or concrete ones. Let's look at each approach in turn:-

 

Solid Floor

Advantages

  • A straightforward method that is well documented.
  • The resulting floor will be able to carry a great deal of weight, a lot more than a suspended approach.
  • The materials are readily available and maybe I can source rubble from local builders.
  • Easy to insulate an area for the cold room by laying material underneath the concrete.
  • We could restrict this method to the parts of the floor that require the heaviest loads.

 Disadvantages

  •  I'll need a huge amount of rubble, hardcore, sand ( estimated 12 cubic metres) and concrete ( another 7 cubic metres ) in order to complete the job. Buying this will be expensive
  • Relying on builders to provide rubble may take a great deal of time and we can't guarantee the quality and quantity provided
  • Filling the space in with rubble may increase the amount of moisture to which the base of the walls are exposed. The air bricks and vents that would normally cause this moisture to evaporate will be rendered useless as they will be covered. Filling the void with material may allow damp to travel easier across the floor space.
  • Laying a concrete slab will result in a long drying time which will push back the opening date of the brewery.
  • Laying concrete will require a great deal on manpower and skill to ensure a level floor and getting the ready mix into the brewery will be awkward.

 

Suspended floor

Advantages

  • The facilities to install beams to create a level floor are all ready in place (with a bit of repair and reinforcement)
  • Block and beam floors go together like lego and can be walked on immediately
  • There are a few grades of beam that can carry suitable loads for the brewery and the strength of the floor can be increased in specific areas by reducing the space between beams and the length of the spans across which the beams stretch.
  • No need to fill in the area under the floor and the current ventilation should keep everything dry and moisture free
  • The blocks can be installed by me on my own
  • As we have a central support the floor can be installed in sections ( i.e the left half first ) meaning I won't have to (re)move all the contents of the main room.

 Disadvantages

  •  I'll need to find a company that can provide the beams to my specifications
  • The brewery is old, and nothing is straight. Installing modern materials that have been manufactured to precise specifications and shapes may prove tricky and annoying.
  • The loads need to be calculated correctly otherwise we risk the beams snapping
  • The beams are heavy and getting them into the brewery might be tricky. Several people will be required to lift and carry each beam or if not then I'll have to rig some sort of crane/gantry system to get them into place.

 

From the cost and speed of installation angle I'm leaning heavily towards the beams and blocks. I've contacted a local builders merchant up the road and they stock the block and beam system. Dividing the room in half and resting one beam end on the wall and the other on the central support we can reduce the length of beams we need to buy from 5m to two 2.4m lengths that a few strong chaps could carry. We can then run a trench drain down the entire length of the room by leaving a gap in the centre between the ends of the beams. Different grades of blocks exists that can either be strong or provide thermal insulation.

The only remaining question is just how strong a 2.4m long beam would be? What force can I load? The manufacturer's website lists the strength of its beams based on a typical spans, but I'm needing smaller than usual lengths as I'm not spanning the width of a house. Plotting the points they give on a graph we can see that the load that the floor can support in relation to beam length isn't linear, but instead as the span becomes shorter the beam can support substantially more. This sort of behaviour generally conforms to an exponential relationship and we can use a mathematical technique called Exponential regression to find an equation that fits this curve ( y=AB^x). I used an online calculator as the maths is quite scary, but it shows a curve that seems to fit the data points nicely. To provide a good buffer I'm looking for a span that provides support for at least 3000kg/m2 or 30KN/m2. Now it's only a case of using the equation we've generated via regression, plugging in our beam length and voila! So 28.98KN/m^2 based on a 2.4m beam with centre separations of 310mm is about right. The pattern will form the basis of most of the room as the cold room will be built on top and our heavy fermenting beer and ready-to-sell beer will live here. The rest of the room won't need to support as much weight as we only need to support enough liquid for a single brew plus anything we are storing in the area. We can probably increase our beam separation to 525mm and calculating this gives us a strength of 13.79KN/m^3 which should be fine. Less beams, less blocks and less cost.


So my job now is to prepare the walls and floor for this new configuration. Talking to building control from the local council here are the steps required:

  1. Repoint all the walls under the floor. The mortar between stones is very crumbly and the last thing we want is stones falling out or shifting under weight.
  2. Demolish the Old brick fireplace hearth support. This pretty much looks like it could fall over with a good kick.
  3. Remove the wood supports on which the beams were resting around the edge of the room and lay a pad of concrete to the same height on the top of the wall. The spaces over the air holes in the wall must be bridged by suitable concrete lintels.
  4. Lay concrete over the entire central pier. This can be achieved by making a frame of wood around it and pouring concrete.
  5. Install Beams and Blocks

OK. Lots to do, let's get cracking.

 

 

Brewery Update #3 - The Depths of Lledrod School

Written by: Alex
Hits: 3161

I'm sure that most of you don't ever think about what is lurking in the area under your house. I certainly didn't until I moved to Wales and bought an old school. If you are lucky to occupy a building that was built after 1970 then it's likely that you have a solid floor made from a slab of concrete poured over well compacted rubble and sand. In our case we have suspended wooden floors. These are supported by joists that rest on small shelves built into the foundation walls. Floor boards are then nailed to the joists and the floor is complete. Underneath the joists is usually a chasm and then a dirt floor. Airbricks along the perimeter of the building allow the outside air to pass under the floor to dry condensation that has formed and prevent damp from rotting the timbers



I started work on the brewery floor after the New Year's celebrations. I had no idea what was under there so the first job was to take a board up and have a look. This proved harder than I first imagined. The boards turned out to be Canadian maple hardwood  with tongue and groove sections around all four sides of each board. This is the same sort of wood they use for bowling alleys! The installers of the floor had done a good job, each board was attached snugly, nailed in place, and there weren't any gaps anywhere to get a crowbar in to lever one up. I had to result to drilling a circular hole in the floor with a hole saw attached to my drill. This proved too much for my drill which promptly died - a good start! I trip into town and a new drill and I was starting to make some progress. Once the hole had been drilled I could get a jigsaw in and start cutting along the tongue and grooves on each side of the board. Due to devious and very wise installation practises the boards were all staggered so that I order to take up the whole floor an entire row of boards had to be cut out.



As more and more of the area under the floor was revealed it was readily apparently that there was a vast space under there. Initially I was thinking that I might be able to fill in the space under the floor with rubble, hire a ready mix truck and convert the suspended floor into a modern concrete one. This is now looking like it will be impractical. I started work on an area at the back of the brewery that is approximately 25m squared, and by the time this area of floor was up it looked like the crew of Time Team had been doing an excavation. I hoped that the rest of the floor wasn't the same depth. Some of the floor supports are in a bad way and fell into dust as I picked them up.



Running between the two doorways ( office and storage room ) is a strip of stone and concrete and this provides an explanation of why some of the floor has lifted up in strange bumps and bulges. The boards were nailed to small pieces of wood resting on the concrete surface and these have weakened or disintegrated over time. The remaining area of the floor which is approximately 9 metres long has boards running in the opposite direction so I needed to cut out a strip one board wide the whole length of the floor. During my work I've found many school items ( forks, toys, marbles etc. ) and a number of iron horseshoes. There is also evidence of what the workmen who installed the floor had for lunch!

Now that I had a strip of floor removed ( and unfortunately mostly destroyed ) I was able to start removing the floor row by row. I want to reclaim most of the floor as I might be able to sell it on so I'm being careful not to break the tongue and grooves if possible. This means cutting the nails holding each section and not prising them up with a crowbar. I'm using a oscillating multi-tool for the job and this does a good job of sliding under each board to cut the nail. There are two disadvantages however - the first is that the blades don't last very long and secondly, after a few hours of this my arm and shoulder are so numb from the vibrations that my arm tingles for half a day afterwards. I've been taking things steady and so far this has been working well. I'm able to remove a section of floor each day and although progress is slow I am at least getting somewhere.


At this stage I'm thinking of replacing the wooden suspended floor with a concrete one. Block and beam systems exist that use a combination of steel reinforced concrete beams and small concrete slabs that fit into the gaps between beams and rest of a grooves. Once the beams have been installed and the blocks placed the floor can be walked on straight away. No waiting for months for a large amount of Ready-Mix concrete to dry! Now that I know what's lurking beneath Lledrod School it's time to apply for a building permit and find a supplier that can supply and deliver the beams. There are a number of Maths-related calculations that need to be done if I'm going to take this approach. Suspended beams have a maximum force than can be applied to them before they break and I'll need to ensure that the floor is strong enough not only to handle the weight of liquid that my small brewery will produce, but also allow expansion of the business going forward.

 

 

Brewery Update #2

Written by: Alex
Hits: 2916

Progress has been slow on the brewery front since my last post in Brewery Update #1. As the weather has got increasingly colder and the festive season has drawn in the needs of our residential building have unfortunately taken priority. Walls have needed re-pointing and our recent decision not to install a wood pellet boiler due to a lack of space has meant that we've needed to source a new heating system before winter. Despite this fact I do have some progress to report.

The office and the storeroom have now been plastered, skimmed and painted with super duper ultra-durable anti-bacterial paint ( thanks Clements Aberystwyth ) so they are looking pretty smart. I've also installed uPVC skirtings around each of these rooms in a hope to reduce the amount of scuffing and damage done to the walls. This process naturally took a while as the drying times of plaster, skim and paint have been much longer in the colder temperatures. With each of these rooms now broadly finished it was time to begin the process of emptying the main room.

 

Sadly the main room of the brewery had become a dumping ground for all the items we didn't want to, or had not got round to storing in the house. When you've got around 90 square metres of floor space you aren't worried about throwing things out either. Odd pieces of wood that you think might be useful form increasingly large piles along with old pipe and sheet materials. The whole room had become a bit of a mess so it became my titanic job to clear the floor. Luckily there was a good deal that could go straight to the house with the unfortunate side effect of filling our bedrooms with piles of boxes!  A few trips to the tip made a small dent in the rubbish that I'd been hoarding and there is a good deal that could be scrapped at a future date. I've been collecting any rubble that might be suitable for filling in the floor and the builders dumped a couple of fireplaces in the main room that needed to be broken up with the trusty SDS chisel.

All in all the floor is looking much clearer now. There was enough free space to start disconnecting the seven storage heaters that were bolted to the walls and begin wheeling them outside. To be honest dealing with storage heaters is not my favourite job in the world. Each of the corpulent, squat, incredible dated cabinets (1985 ) weights around 175-200kg and provides a nest for a whole host of grisly crawling things and the remains of what they've been eating. It's necessary to open the units to remove the heat bricks in order to have any chance of lifting them without a crane. The first stage is to undo the host of screws that secures the front panel to the unit, whereby a large sheet of white powdery material will fall out on to you in a hazy cloud. Luckily this isn't a decaying package of asbestos ( i've checked the Asbestos Institute's Website ) but a compressed sheet of Silica in a Hessian bag that has long since bio-degraded. Next we remove the sixteen heat bricks from the unit, eight of which are behind the heating elements. Surprisingly only two small screws now stand between wrenching the carcass off the wall and finding out what else is living behind the unit.



The school used an electric immersion heater in a tank stored in a cupboard to provide hot water for the children to wash their hands and for washing up in the kitchen that I've already torn out. This tank now needed to be drained as unfortunately none of its valves were turned off when the water was turned back on when we bought the property back in February. Luckily there was a drain valve on the tank, so repeatedly filling a trug with around 15-20 litres at a time and pouring the water down the drain did the trick! The connections to the tank were easily disconnected and the tank removed with no problem. I then setting about breaking up the cupboard and disconnecting the electrics that fed the heating element. A combination of saw and pry-bar made short work of the cupboard but exposed the ruined wall behind that I'll add to the list of walls that need replastering once the floor has been done. It also seems that the mains water pipe is actually somewhere underneath the wooden suspended floor so I guess I'll hunt for it once the floorboards have been removed.

During my excavations I was hoping to find some hidden treasure long-buried and forgotten about in this old welsh school. So far though, only some crayons, a marble, a lego door, and old sock and what seems to be one of the very first tubes of toothpaste to have fluoride added!



I'm hoping to achieve a bit more before Christmas and New Year and hopefully will be able to report the removal of some or all of the floor in brewery update #3!

A Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to you all!

 

 

Brewery Update #1

Written by: Alex
Hits: 2152

When starting a project like this the first job is to deal with all the structural issues and remove all the unneeded equipment. I would love to report that this week I've been installing brewery equipment but unfortunately some other tasks must be completed first. I have been focusing mostly on the two smaller rooms in the building henceforth known as the "Storage Room" and the "Office". Good progress has been made on the storage room. I spent a day ripping out the chipboard kitchen units that were present, removed the large stainless steel industrial sink and cut and drained the water pipes. It was typical that the kitchen units were positioned to hide a couple of weak patches in the plaster, some cracks in the wall and some peeling paint. Scraping the walls also resulted in some additional crumbly holes so it was out with the bonding plaster. Unfortunately it takes a while to dry at winter temperatures so whilst this was happening I focused on regrouting the floor. Luckily the quarry tiles in the room are in pretty good condition and scrub up quite well.



Progress in the Office has also been encouraging. I've made some headway removing the pinboards that were screwed on the wall, although sometimes getting screws out that have been there 50 years seems more difficult than sawing through 3 inch thick joists! The walls that were exposed seem in pretty good condition. The next job in this room is to remove the three small kids sinks and find the main water pipe for the property. I believe it originates here but until I remove the boxing around the pipe work it is just guess work. After knocking the tiles off the wall and repairing any plaster damage it's time to begin painting. I'm hoping that some primer paint I have will stick to the horrible thick school paint, I have some super-grip that should do the trick. I need to track down some hygienic trade paint with which to coat the walls. This will need to be hardwearing, scrubbable and preferably have an anti-bacterial coating. A visit to Clements in Aber should yield some results!

 

 

A Home for HopForge

Written by: Alex
Hits: 2813

So it's been a very long time since I last posted any updates for Hopforge. This hasn't been because there are any plans to abandon the project, but mainly due to the lack of any news to share. Ever since moving back to the Aberystwyth area I've been on the look out for a suitable premises for the brewery. Originally I was planning on renting a small industrial unit on The Glenyrafon Estate but the possibility of owning a building to house the company would obviously be preferable. In September 2014 I came across Lledrod School for sale by the local council. The school functioned as a primary school, until in 2011 it was closed due to the small number of students and the council's plans to consolidate students in the area into fewer, larger groups. The site consists of three buildings - The Former Headmaster's House, The Former School and a small toilet block which the students used -  split into girls and boys facilities. This seemed like an excellent candidate for a brewery and we put forward an offer to buy it. In November 2014 after participating in a blind auction for the property we were informed that our offer had been accepted provided we apply for change of use  planning permission before the sale could be completed.

As I'd never drawn up planning permission documentation before, the next couple of weeks were rather confusing and frustrating. The official guidelines were full of technical terminology that I didn't understand and there was a lack of any sort of example documents to use as a basis for adaptation to our situation. We also had to commission an architect to draw up some floor plans and elevations  for us (which weren't cheap) despite the fact were weren't making any changes to the exterior of the buildings. All in all the planning stage of the purchase took 14 months and during this time we had no idea how long we'd be waiting for the council's decision. I didn't want to release anything regarding the brewery until I was sure they'd agree to our proposed plans. During the waiting period I worked full time on some proprietary software for the brewery to handle the entire Brewing to sales process and designed and built my own fermentation control system ( discussed in future blogs) so at least this time spent reasonably constructively.

 

We finally obtained the keys to Lledrod School on February 22nd 2016. The buildings had been empty for a number of years and the first priority was to make the Headmaster's house habitable so the we could move in and cease paying for our rented property. We spent the entire first month scraping wallpaper and paint off the walls. The headmaster’s house had never had a shower or a gas installation so there were some major changes that needed to be made and some of the floors were in need of repair. We made the move over the School in June 2016 storing all of our possessions in boxes in the school building and continued to work on site, and it has only been very recently that we've been able to clear the floor of boxes in the brewery so that work can commence.‎ I am therefore happy to introduce you to Lledrod Primary School which I will now begin turning into Hopforge Brewery! 

 

 

The School was built in 1887 and is built of stone with a wood and slate tiled roof. The building consists of three rooms, a large central space measuring around 98m^2 and small side rooms at the front and rear of the property. The main room which will house the brewery equipment has a real wood floor that i'll need to replace with concrete, screed and a non slip epoxy coating in order to comply with health and safety. This requires applying for a building notice from the Local council's buildings control department. At the same time the plan is to create a central drainage channel and sloped floor to make it easier to keep things clean and Funnel the waste into an external tank outside. Apart from being repainted, the building also needs some plastering work and pointing of the outside stone work.‎ Once the floor is completed the next stage will be to build an insulated fermentation room, much like a pub cellar. This room will be temperature controlled year round.‎ The work of installing the brewery equipment can then begin.

 

I shall be releasing regular updates, pictures and videos of progress and publishing them here and on Facebook and Twitter, so watch this space and thank you for your patience!

 

 

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